Tag: Nsa Surveillance

The “Citizenfour” documentary filmmaker stopped by “The Daily Show” on Monday for a captivating interview in which she discussed how Edward Snowden first got in touch with her and what the repercussions of the whistle-blower’s courageous acts have been.

It seems our elected officials have no intention of reining in the National Security Agency’s mad-scientist quest to know everything about our communications and movements. If we want our privacy back, we’re going to have to fight for it.

Hot off the heels of a reporting scandal that saw the vaunted news program ooh and ahh over Benghazi lies, “60 Minutes” has just aired a mind-blowingly charitable “report” on the NSA’s mass surveillance.

The crisis caused in Europe by American intelligence interceptions of its allies’ electronic communications derives from a problem Europeans have known and put up with since the Second World War. The time has come to call a halt.

European Union Commissioner for Justice Viviane Reding says the NSA surveillance of top allies has nothing to do with terrorism, and may instead be an effort to seek advantages for American corporations.

Calling the U.S. government’s spying on Brazilian officials “a grave matter, an assault on national sovereignty and individual rights, and ... incompatible with relations between friendly nations,” the South American country has pulled out of the only White House state dinner scheduled this year.

Whether he passes reforms or not, President Obama’s mass surveillance program has made him the closest thing we have to Big Brother. Will his top lieutenants, Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, take that funk with them into the next election?

When the House recently considered an amendment that would have dismantled the NSA’s bulk phone records collection program, the White House swiftly condemned the measure. But only five years ago, Sen. Barack Obama supported substantial changes to NSA surveillance programs. Here are some of the proposals he co-sponsored as a senator.

All the stories about the government’s quest for Total Information Awareness about the phone calls, email, Internet searches, etc. of 312 million ordinary Americans raise some questions in my mind. There are so many things about these stories that don’t make sense.

Don’t let the acquittal of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning on aiding the enemy charges or the temporary asylum Russia granted to NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden fool you. The harsh treatment of whistle-blowers will likely continue into the foreseeable future in pace with the needs and expansion of the surveillance state itself.

A look at the day’s political happenings, including Anthony Weiner’s wife is reportedly taking a break from her job as Hillary Clinton’s top aide and North Carolina’s governor makes an insulting offer to protesters demonstrating against the state’s recently signed-into-law abortion bill.

The Guardian columnist broke another major story about the NSA on Wednesday, this one detailing an Internet surveillance program that allows the powerful agency to spy on the emails, Web chats and search histories of millions of Americans without prior authorization.

The Guardian columnist, who broke the story about the extent of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, is among a handful of NSA critics who have been invited to give testimony before Congress to counter the “constant misleading information” from intelligence officials, Rep. Alan Grayson said.

Although the House defeated a measure that would have defunded the bulk phone metadata collection program, the narrow 205-217 vote showed that there is significant support in Congress to reform NSA surveillance programs. Here are six other legislative proposals on the table.

The National Security Agency is a “supercomputing powerhouse” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency uses those machines to sift through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture. But ask the NSA, as part of a FOIA request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees’ email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology.

A top U.S. intelligence official has confirmed that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court on Friday extended the National Security Agency’s authority to gather the telephone metadata of tens of millions of Americans.

Since Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA’s mass surveillance of Americans, interest in cryptography has been piqued. That’s fine if you’re a nerd, but what about Grandma’s privacy? Luckily there are fairly simple ways to communicate privately.

In an interview with The Associated Press on Sunday, Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald said that Edward Snowden has very sensitive documents that detail how the National Security Agency operates and reveal how one could evade the NSA’s surveillance program.

The U.S. should be careful in its pursuit of whistle-blower Edward Snowden because he controls information that could become the United States’ “worst nightmare,” according to The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald.

NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden tells Glenn Greenwald that he did not reveal classified information to China or Russia, his recent hosts, or that, as was reported by The New York Times based on the speculation of anonymous sources, his laptops were “drained.”

In a new video produced by the ACLU, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker says it’s time to take a stand for American civil liberties in the wake of the recent revelations about the scope of the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance program.

Daniel Ellsberg was able to remain in the U.S. after leaking the Pentagon Papers because, “The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago,” he argues in an op-ed Sunday. Edward Snowden would be greeted with a much different fate, Ellsberg notes, and as a result, he disagrees with those who compare Snowden to him unfavorably because of the NSA whistle-blower’s exit from the U.S.

A look at the day’s political happenings, including Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly renewing their gun control push and why Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s catchy new campaign video against his Democratic Senate opponent is a big fail.

A look at the day’s political happenings, including student loan interest rates double due to Congress’ inaction and Texas Republicans begin their push to pass a controversial anti-abortion law in the new special legislative session after their attempts were thwarted last week.

A look at the day’s political happenings, including President Obama’s latest concern about NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden and how we’re already seeing results from the Supreme Court’s monumentally bad Voting Rights Act decision.

Speculation about the NSA whistle-blower’s whereabouts has heightened after several witnesses said that he wasn’t on board a flight from Moscow to Cuba, which reports had pegged as his next destination.

After the announcement Friday that charges had been filed against NSA leaker Edward Snowden under the Espionage Act, the Guardian columnist told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that the prosecution solidified the Obama administration’s “absolutely atrocious record” toward whistle-blowers.

In defending the NSA’s sweeping collection of Americans’ phone call records, Obama administration officials have repeatedly pointed out how it could have helped thwart the 9/11 attacks: If only the surveillance program had been in place before Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. authorities would have been able to identify one of the future hijackers who was living in San Diego.